The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Data is often encoded for communication between computing devices via wired or wireless mediums. Data encoded at a source device is transmitted via a communication medium to a destination device, which then decodes the data prior to use. Source devices typically use complex codes or algorithms that increase communication performance (e.g., bit-rate, bandwidth efficiency, noise resistance) over a given communication medium. Destination devices, when receiving data encoded with these complex codes or algorithms, may employ various decoding methods, such as soft-decoding, to decode the data received. While soft-decoding permits a destination device to decode this data once received, soft-decoders implemented in hardware often have an increased internal bit-width (e.g., bit-widths of arithmetic logic or memory) to maintain resolution of soft-decoding information through iterations of the decoding process. Increasing the internal bit-width of a soft-decoder, however, increases design complexity and an amount of substrate area consumed by the soft-decoder, which may result in increased design costs, fabrication costs, and/or soft-decoder power consumption.